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Talk:William Henry Harrison
Other Whig Candidates of 1836 There appears that there were two other presidential candidates for the Whig Party during the 1836 Presidential Election. The other two were Hugh Lawson White and Daniel Webster. Should something be mentioned about White and Webster's running as Whigs in the info box? The info box would be alot like 1860 Democratic Candidates John Breckinridge and Stephen Douglas on their articles. -- 21:35, January 8, 2016 (UTC)Jacob Chesley the Alternate Historian ::Also Willie Magnum. Turtle Fan (talk) 02:27, January 9, 2016 (UTC) :It should have said "nominee", not "candidate". That's been corrected. So, no, we don't need to add other Whigs who sought the nomination, since they weren't actually nominated. Breckinridge did received the nomination from the Southern Dems and Douglas the Northern Dems in 1860, hence our decision to list both of them. TR (talk) 21:45, January 8, 2016 (UTC) :Ah dammit, I misread that. Yes, since the Whigs did some weird regional nomination process in 1836, yes, we should probably use the 1860 Dem model here. TR (talk) 21:51, January 8, 2016 (UTC) ::It was an interesting strategy, certainly worth trying once. I've often wondered how different our history would look if it had worked. I'm almost certain participatory democracy would be stronger; so many people don't bother voting these days because they live outside of the handful of swing states that the two parties don't concede to each other before the campaign starts. :::I'm not clear what the strategy was. Was the intent to have each regional candidate get Electoral College delegates in their area of popularity and then have them elect a Whig President from among the candidates? ML4E (talk) 18:22, January 9, 2016 (UTC) ::::Close. The idea was that there would be no safe blue states (to use an anachronistic term), that Van Buren would face strong challenges everywhere while each Whig candidate could drive home a message tailored to have local appeal. If Van Buren tried to match one regional candidate at this game, he'd run the risk of losing even more ground against others elsewhere. Hang the Electoral College on Election Day, send the election to the House (which the Whigs controlled; you'd need a House majority to make this strategy work, unless perhaps you were willing to gamble that the majority party's Congressmen were not all on board with their presidential nominee), and when the House voted all the Whigs would be expected to support whichever of their candidates had done the best. ::::There are difficulties here, especially with the highly regional nature of the strategy. A Which congressman from North Carolina who had supported Magnum might be far, far less willing to support Webster, for instance, if it came to that. It was a rather rickety plan, but as I said, at least worth trying once. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:40, January 9, 2016 (UTC) ::As for 1860, there was was only one Democratic nominee. Enough Douglas-hating southern delegates walked out of the Charleston convention to deny him the nomination, but all that accomplished was to trigger a call to reconvene in Baltimore a few weeks later. His enemies walked out of that one too, but this time the DNC had accreditted enough alternates to keep a quorum, and Douglas was nominated in accordance with the party's by-laws. The so-called Southern Democrats had no standing within the party structure. Turtle Fan (talk) 02:27, January 9, 2016 (UTC) :::All of this is true. In the end, since Breckinridge carried more electoral votes than Douglas did, I'd suggest following the the historical narrative that there was a "Northern" Democrat and a "Southern" Democrat is appropriate. TR (talk) 16:34, January 9, 2016 (UTC) ::::I think the closest analogy is your namesake's 1912 bid. All the key players in his campaign were Republicans. They outperformed the Republican nominee on Election Day. They could have easily called the party they made up for themselves "Progressive Republicans" or something. All just semantics. Another comparison we might draw is to the National Labour Organization that gave Ramsay MacDonald a ticket to run on in the 1931 general election after the real Labour Party ousted him as leader and expelled him from the party. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:40, January 9, 2016 (UTC) ::::Sorry, I forgot to suss out my main point: The 1836 Whig nominees were cooperating; the 1860 "Democrats" were competing with each other. I can't help thinking that's a pretty important distinction to draw. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:42, January 9, 2016 (UTC) I messed up a while back. There were actually four Whig Party candidates in the 1836 election, not three. Harrison ran in the north, Webster ran in Massachusetts, Hugh Lawson White ran in the south, and the fourth one Willie Person Mangum, ran in South Carolina. However, Mangum also received Nullifer votes along with normal Whig votes. I just fixed the article to mention him. -- 15:50, July 28, 2016 (UTC)Jacob Chesley the Alternate Historian Delete Rectifying my own errors, this belongs in hist refs.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 09:26, July 25, 2016 (UTC) :Yep. TR (talk) 02:40, August 2, 2016 (UTC)